OKay so I was making some shirts for Christmas using plastic sheet protectors as stencils. I used a light coat of spray adhesive to make the stencil stick to the shirt, turned out great except on one shirt... the adhesive got goopy and now there are globs of dried adhesive on the shirt.

I am pretty sure the glue will come out in the wash. But... I have to iron the shirt first to set the paint. Do you think if I iron it I will ruin my iron with glue? I know you can iron over a piece of wax paper to get wax out of clothes, do you think the same is true for adhesive? If I iron over it will it set the glue into the shirt?

Ok so I havent posted anything to Craftster in a loong time, I have been so busy with school! I am getting a BFA degree in textiles, and for one of my classes this semester we did a rug tufting project. Tufting involves using a tufting gun to insert fabric strips or yarn between holes onto a backing fabric and makes loops on one side of the fabric. It's similar to hooking rugs.

I chose to do my rug project based off of early Southern American quilts. I live in Georgia and quilting has quite a history here! I did a lot of research and ended up writing a paper about it in another class. I wanted to emulate those women making the quilts, who maybe didn't have the resources to buy all new fabric and used what they had- old clothes, scraps, feed sacks, etc.

The rugs are tufted with hand-cut fabric strips, I cut up all my old clothes that didn't fit anymore. It was a LOT of work, cutting the strips took almost as much time as tufting the rugs did! I would estimate that about 100 hours of work went into each of these rugs. Except for the backing fabric (I used burlap), I, proud to say the rugs are made of all recycled materials!

Ok enough backstory... here are the pictures!

the first rug i made, it is a little over three feet square (About a meter sqaure)

each sqaure was done on a frame and then sewn together, here is one sqaure finished and taken off the frame and one frame stretched and ready to go!

I backed it with an old bedsheet and embroidered my name and the year in the middle

Here is the second rug i made, it is about the same size as the first

all the squares not sewn together yet!

one tufted square... front...

... and back!

EDIT: here are more pictures of the tufting tool:a tufted sqaure, the tufting tool is at the bottom with the fabric strip threaded through

here is the tufting tool, i was being silly so ignore my face

I hope you enjoyed my post, comments and criticism welcome! I go to present it tomorrow in class, then I will be done with school for the winter break!

I recently participated in the 4th round of the Chunky Houses Swap... I only had to make 4 houses but I ended up making a whole neighborhood! I cut out house shapes from cardboard for the bases and used scrapbooking paper, old books, and other ephemera and Mod Podge to decoupage the houses.

OKay so this was ridiculously easy. Almost too easy. I've seen those blik wall decals that are like $30/pkg and I just cant swing that. So I used these tutorials from Threadbanger and Istructables to get the basic idea and went to town.

I purchased one roll of brown translucent contact paper from my local Dollar Tree. It turned out to be maybe 18" by 2'.

Our living room in the apartment is so freakin boring... I live with three guys between the ages of 21 and 25 so you can imagine the atrocity that is the living room. I added some mushrooms and grass growing from the couch and birds flying towards the sunset. although one of my roomates said they look like bats. Oh well.

(The glare cut this off a little. One thing about using dollar store contact paper is that its not matte.)

Then, feeling pumped up from that, I moved some posters in my and my boyfriend's room and put up a nice bonsai tree:(Excuse the boy. He was sleepy and wouldn't move out of the way.)

I love it! it really classes up the place

I did this as sort of practice for when we move in december... moving to a new house that my roommate bought... it has a separate apartment in the basement so he and his girlfriend are going to live upstars and me and my boyfriend have own own space in the basement. We already picked out paint colors and we have a lot of plans. I want to do my bathroom in deep teal and white and do a giant peacock feather decal on the wall!!! I'm really excited, I drew up some sketches already

So... I made this squid in last semester's Three-Dimensional Design class (I'm working towards a BFA). It was a months-long process. The assignment was to create a relief sculpture out of oil clay with a area of 4x4 inches. My idea was to do a squid and I got special permission to do three separate sculptures to execute my "artistic vision", haha. Let me just say that 12 square inches of cast iron is HEAVY!!! I had to lug it home in my purse on the subway... not ideal.

The oil clay was weird to work with. My art teacher made it himself. It smells like motor oil and doesn't dry out. After we made the sculptures we made a mold for the casting out of some kind of weird green sand that hardened. I was there for the iron pour, we did a midnight iron pour party for our class and poured red hot iron into all the molds. It was very exciting and fun to watch... like fireworks!!

After the iron cooled we had to sand down all the extra iron attached to the sculpture and clean it up a bit. I had pictures of the mold and the iron pour on my phone but I lost it... so I hope these pictures of the finished product suffice

Here we go....

for scale:

I hope you like! It's one of the most favorite things I've ever made Let me know

EDIT:

Oh! I found a picture of the original clay sculpture before I cast it in iron!!

EDIT v2.0:

OH MY GOD!! I'm a featured project?!?

THANK YOU SO MUCH YOU GUYS! You have no idea how happy that made me!! Thank you, thank you, thank you, from the bottom of my heart. I love you guys on Craftster so much!!!

Yeah so I love the look of a scarf all wrapped cozy round the neck but not so much the bulkiness and dangly bits. And my hands are alwys cold at school. So with some uber soft Christmas mystery yarn I whipped up this cowl scarf and fingerless mitts set. My lovely friend Danielle is modeling!!

In progress.

I've since woven in all the ends and I lvoe it! So nice and warm but light at the same time. Let me know what ou think!!